College Drinking: Guys Get 'Wasted'; Women Become 'Tipsy'

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When college-age guys and gals are asked to describe how drunk
one of their friends is, they tend to apply more moderate terms
to women, even when females are heavily intoxicated, a new study
reveals.

Researchers found that students are more likely to describe
women's level of intoxication with words like "tipsy" or
"buzzed," suggesting they've downed a
moderate amount of alcohol, while men's drinking tends to be
described in terms reflecting excessive consumption, such as
"hammered," "trashed" or "wasted."

In other words, people of both sexes tend to express women's
drinking in moderate terms.

"This is likely due to differences in social and gender
norms for female drinkers compared to male drinkers," said
study researcher Ash Levitt, a research scientist at the Research
Institute on Addictions at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

In the study, researchers asked 145 college students to read a
brief story of a situation involving four friends — two men and
two women — celebrating the main character's birthday in a bar.

In each story, the researchers switched the sex of the main
character, how much he or she drank, and how this person behaved.
Study participants rated on a scale from 1 to 5 how well each of
four moderate drinking terms (including "buzzed" and "tipsy") or
11 heavy drinking terms (including "obliterated" and "tanked")
applied to the main character in the story. [ 7
Ways Alcohol Affects Your Health ]

Participants correctly perceived whether the character was
moderately versus heavily intoxicated, Levitt said. "However,
moderate terms were applied more to female characters, even when
they were heavily drinking," he said.

Troubling implications

If college-age women underestimate both their own and other
women's level of intoxication by using moderate, and perhaps more
polite, terms to describe it, "then they may downplay the risky
and potentially dangerous situations that could have very real,
negative consequences," Levitt said.

College-age men may face a similar increase in health risks, but
for different reasons, Levitt pointed out.

"The fact that men tend to gravitate toward heavy terms more than
moderate terms may reflect that men are influenced by norms for
college drinking, such as how much other college men drink,"
Levitt said. Consuming large amounts of alcohol might be seen as
a normal part of a male's college experience — an expected
behavior for a guy and his buddies that's considered fun.

"Such behavior is not only misguided, but it also has dangerous
consequences," Levitt said, adding that alcohol poisoning and
rising rates of severe drinking problems in college students —
both men and women — are some troubling trends.

The new results support the findings of a previous study by the
same researchers that found similar differences in thelanguage
choices used by both sexes to describe themselves after drinking,
Levitt said.

The earlier research showed that college-age women tended to use
words such as "light-headed" or "loopy" even after drinking
heavily, and that guys were more likely to describe themselves as
"smashed" or "plastered," regardless of the amount of alcohol
they consumed.